But just barely...
The advent of online auctions fueled the meteorite boom, and today scientists are going to the internet in search of study samples -- sometimes paying upward of $70,000 for a smallish rock.
"I check eBay pretty regularly, as goofy as it is to have to buy samples from dealers," said Randy Korotev, a lunar geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied moon rocks for 30 years. "In a sense I don't mind. I think these finders are doing a wonderful thing for the scientific community. It's far cheaper than going to space and bringing the rocks back."
Most dealers on eBay are reputable, Korotev said, because meteorite dealers are aggressively self-policing.
Prospectors who want a stamp of approval for their meteorites register their rocks with The Meteoritical Society (which presently lists 89 lunar meteorites) or the meteorite catalog at the Natural History Museum in Britain. Finders must send several grams of dust from their meteorite for analysis and registration. Without this authentication, scientists can't use information drawn from the samples in a scientific paper.
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